I can sympathise in some ways, given that even Web user itself gives us '100 Ways To Speed Up This and That' every month, and I will be honest, not every link is a 'healthy' one.

For me I kept up to date with the Nvidia drivers and the last one (Dec 2007) appears to have rendered my graphics card virtually useless for some games - Second Life, for example, has a weird 'tartan' distortion throughout. Today I dug out my May 2007 driver - reinstalled it, ignored all the 'This driver is older than your current one' warnings and Bingo! Everything back the way it should be.

Sometimes an upgrade is a downgrade...............